Originally a visual artist, choreographer Lar Lubovitch "paints the music in space" so that the stage acts as a vibrant canvas and his ensemble often coheres in a single robust or mesmerizing gesture. North Star, the 1978 masterpiece recently brought back into active repertory thanks in part to special funding from the National Endowment for the Arts, was the first concert dance piece choreographed to the subtly shifting minimalism of Philip Glass, and it set a standard for organic, kinetic motion that has rarely been surpassed. For the Lar Lubovitch Dance Company's upcoming Celebrity Series engagement, the luscious undulations of North Star are matched with more recent work, the playful male trio Little Rhapsodies (2007), The Legend of Ten (2010) to Brahms, and the emotionally violent 2011 Crisis Variations (with a commissioned instrumental score by Yevgeniy Sharlat based on Franz Liszt's "Transcendental Etudes"), which Lubovitch has described as "an action painting of the sensations." As former Lubovitch principal dancer Peggy Baker once explained, "Lar is not afraid of beauty, and he's not afraid of ecstasy."

Vertigo at Jacob’s Pillow In 2005, graffiti artist Banksy stenciled the Palestinian side of the concrete separation barrier between Israel and Gaza with the dark silhouette of a little girl lofted upward by a bouquet of balloons.

Sequence 8: Out of the Box When acrobat Colin Davis appears at the beginning of Sequence 8 in the role of a suit-and-tie-wearing radio announcer, a kind of Ira-without-Glasses, he is introducing acrobatics with a meta-narrative.

NICOLE PIERCE WALKS THE WALK | January 16, 2013 Dance maker Nicole Pierce was working the glue gun, constructing mossy objects, papier-mâché thingamabobs and items that she could hang from a net hoisted across the Art Deco balconies of the South End's Villa Victoria Center for the Arts.